What Is A Ketogenic Diet And What Are The Benefits?

Every organ except the brain and the nervous system can use fatty acids as an alternative fuel source. Actually the brain and the nervous system can function fairly efficiently without glucose (carbohydrates), because they can get up to 75% of energy from ketones. Ketones are a byproduct of the incomplete breakdown of fatty acids in the liver. They are used as fuel for brain and nervous system.

When you are into this kind of diet, you will not have problems with long-term maintenance. For instance, people who want to get bigger muscles will find it easier because you are keeping the correct protein ratio and burning fat and not muscle. It would be impossible to survive your whole life on a low calorie diet but you can survive on this plan because you are not in a caloric restrictive mode all the time.

What to Expect

For starters your energy will be drained. Without carbohydrates your body won’t know what energy source to turn to for a few days so you may experience feelings of weakness while you train or until your body becomes adapted at using fat. While this isn’t a bad thing you must understand that you have to change your training intensity. There’s no way that you can keep training with super high volume while you use one of these diets.

Working Out and Exercise

Aerobic exercise with ketogenic diet is the perfect combination that you can ever encounter since most of us want to have a physically fit and healthy body. With these two factors you can achieve the body that you want and still have enough energy to so some exercise. Diet will always be useless if you will not do an exercise. Imagine yourself losing weight but not having a firm and fit body. This is what will most likely happen to you if you lack an exercise when you are having your diet.

You may reduce weight but your body structure will not be in perfect shape. In addition, exercise has many other benefits.

“Exercise is also known to help contribute to a sense of confidence and well-being, thus possibly lowering rates of anxiety and depression.” – healthline.com

How Your Body Sheds Fat

Ketones are created in the liver and are an efficient source of energy for the body. Fatty acids that are broken down from body fat are created in the liver as ketones. Ketones can only be made present when there is a lack of sugar and glucose in the body. Carbohydrates contain both of these substances. It will always be difficult to lose weight on a high carbohydrate based diet.

On the ketogenic diet, the amount of sugar and glucose is reduced to the point where they are no longer the primary source of fuel to be burned in the bloodstream.

As a bonus, by loading in carbohydrates from a depleted base it is possible to super-saturate our muscles with glycogen. That is (in lay terms) muscles almost empty of glycogen (and water) are so hungry for glucose that they can be ‘tricked’ into taking up as much as 50% more glycogen (and water) before they realise whats happened. In this super-glycogenated state our muscles look and feel perpetually ‘pumped’ and swollen. And swelling a muscle cell to the limit is a powerful stimulus for muscle growth.

The balance of your calories should come from, you guessed it, fat. The irony here is that you must eat fat in order to start the fat burning furnace. This is a fact that you must get used to. Many advantages come into play when you eat this way.